Guillemets (« and ») in HTML
Guillemets are the double angle quotation marks used in French, Spanish, Russian and other typographic traditions. Their named references are « and ».
At a glance
- Character
- « »
- Named entity
- « »
- Decimal reference
- « »
- Hex reference
- « »
- Unicode code point
- U+00AB, U+00BB
- Unicode name
- LEFT-POINTING and RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
- In the entity reference
- Punctuation
In detail
The Unicode names say left pointing and right pointing rather than opening and closing, and that wording is deliberate. French and Spanish open with the left pointing mark and close with the right pointing one. German traditionally does the reverse, opening with the right pointing mark so the points face inward toward the quoted text. The characters are the same; only the convention differs, so a localisation that swaps the strings but not the marks will look wrong to half its readers.
French typography adds a spacing rule that catches most implementations. A narrow no-break space belongs between the mark and the quoted text on both sides, so the quotation does not butt against the angle and the space never becomes a line break opportunity. An ordinary space is the common shortcut and it produces a quotation that can wrap immediately after the opening mark.
Neither character needs escaping in HTML. Both live in the Latin-1 range, which is why they survived the era of single byte encodings intact and why their named entities are among the oldest in the specification. Typing them directly into a UTF-8 document is perfectly correct, and the entities are there for generated output and for source files where a reviewer needs to see the intent.
They are frequently pressed into service as pagination chevrons, and that is where they cause trouble. A screen reader may announce them as quotation marks, which tells a listener nothing about pagination, and their vertical alignment is tuned for sitting beside text rather than centring inside a button. A real arrow character with a label, or a CSS drawn triangle plus visually hidden text, does the job properly.
Examples
<p lang="fr">« Bonjour »</p>  is the narrow no-break space at U+202F, the character French typography calls for here.
<p lang="de">»Guten Tag«</p>Things that catch people out
- Single guillemets exist as separate characters at U+2039 and U+203A. They are not the double marks scaled down and they are not in the entity reference tool's list, so look them up by code point.
- Using them as next and previous buttons without visible or hidden text leaves the control unlabelled. The character is not a name.
- A right to left context flips the visual order of the marks, so hard coding which one comes first in a translated string produces reversed quotations in Arabic or Hebrew content.
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Tools for this
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